Not possible, since the music and sound effects were mixed on the same track. There are some Filmation DVDs that do have isolated music/SFX tracks for some episodes, but no isolatable music-only tracks exist.

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That's why it's crazy. Who knows if someone has a set of tapes somewhere with the music? Anything is possible. Not necessarily probable, but possible.

If the original recordings no longer exist, I think a happy medium would be Varese-like re-scored tracks. I imagine the entire collection would not run more than 2 or 3 CDs worth of music, since some of the cues were created for other Filmation series, so that would not be featured on a TAS soundtrack.

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Oh, if you used only the music written specifically for TAS, it wouldn't come anywhere near filling a whole CD. This YouTube compilation contains, I daresay, well over half of TAS's library music, and it runs only 15 minutes and change.

Personally, I'd rather have an overall "Music of Filmation" box set with Ellis & Prescott's scores to all their shows -- and the stuff from other composers too, like Levy & Saban's He-Man/She-Ra scores and Frank Becker's BraveStarr score.

Roddenberry's 11th hour rejection of TAS has much to do with certain negative perceptions of it, but in its day, the show was praised by once-skeptical fans, won an Emmy and was considered far and above typcial--if not all Saturday morning material. Some thought it was serious enough to air during prime time.

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Yes, but there have always been those who rejected it as well. The opinions of Star Trek fans have never, ever, ever been monolithic. Each new incarnation of the franchise has had people who hated it with a passion and people who adored it with a passion, and plenty in between.

And with TAS, there's the added complication that even its status as legitimate Trek canon is unclear in many people's minds. Contrary to what you suggest, that was the case well before Roddenberry's '89 memo. Since TAS was only intermittently syndicated, plenty of fans never actually saw it until it came out on home video in the early '90s, or were only familiar with it through Alan Dean Foster's novelizations. Quite a few Trek tie-in novelists in the '80s disregarded or were simply unaware of TAS; for instance, A.C. Crispin's acclaimed novel Yesterday's Son, featuring the Guardian of Forever, shows no awareness of the events of "Yesteryear."

A while back, I was looking through old DC Trek comics from the early '80s, and I came upon an interesting letter-column discussion in which it was revealed that the comic's editor Bob Greenberger liked TAS and wanted to count it as "real" Star Trek, but the comic's writer at the time, Mike W. Barr, didn't care for it and preferred to disregard it. Which may be why Arex & M'Ress weren't added to the book until Len Wein became its writer (though it was Peter David's later work with them in the comic that most fans remember, so that he's often mistakenly credited with their addition). And this was years before the Roddenberry memo.

For such an expensive, niche / luxury format, it speaks to the notion that Paramount recognized the popularity of TAS as a vital part of the franchise, and felt it was a worthy, money-earning the effort--even on a format which at the time, was not serious competition to the videotape.

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True, but the point is that it was never universally embraced by fans. Again, it's a mistake to assume fandom has a single consensus opinion of anything. Look at TNG again. Obviously it was a big enough hit in its first two seasons to become quite successful and spawn a whole generation of first-run syndicated TV drama/adventure shows. But for the first few years it was on, it was viciously blasted by TOS loyalists as a betrayal, as a corruption, as a misguided attempt to ride the coattails of something great, as Trek in name only and unworthy of the name. Many of the original cast members were publicly hostile toward it for years, partly because they saw it as a potential threat to their continued employment in Trek movies or felt that they should've been the stars of a revived TV series. There was intense negative feeling toward it from some quarters of fandom, but that didn't change the fact that it was hugely successful with audiences in general -- exactly as is the case with the Abramsverse today. There is no consensus among Trek fans and never will be.

But TAS is different because, although it captured critical acclaim in its day and was definitely better-remembered than a lot of its animated peers, the contingent of fans who had negative or dismissive attitudes toward it -- or had simply never seen it -- was always a much larger percentage of the fan base. TNG eventually won over all but the most extreme loyalists. ENT is at least somewhat more accepted now than it was a decade ago, or at least there are currently fewer people trying to claim it was an alternate universe. But to this day, it's hard to find a discussion of TAS that doesn't involve questions being raised about whether it even "counts" at all. As with any other Trek incarnation, there are those who embrace it and those who reject it -- but the ratio is different, with the latter category being consistently a larger percentage of the whole.

Not possible, since the music and sound effects were mixed on the same track. There are some Filmation DVDs that do have isolated music/SFX tracks for some episodes, but no isolatable music-only tracks exist.

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Do you have a URL source for this that the Dialog, Music, Effects stems do not exist?

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No, but my information comes direct from Andy Mangels, who's produced the majority of the Filmation DVD releases and is probably the leading Filmation expert/historian around today (he's recently coauthored a book about the studio with its founder Lou Scheimer, Creating the Filmation Generation). I've asked him about the survival of Filmation music and about the way it was used on the DVD sets, and he made it clear that there are no surviving "clean" recordings of the music -- at least, none that are known. I keep hoping that someday, the intact music masters from Filmation's shows will be unearthed in a Hollywood warehouse or someone's closet. But to the best of anyone's current knowledge, they no longer exist.

But I should be clear: the dialogue tracks are separate from the music/sound FX tracks. Most shows are mixed that way to make it easier to redub them for foreign markets. So with the right equipment, you can isolate the music/FX track from the voice track, and that's how that YouTube compilation linked above was created -- by piecing together segments of the cues that didn't have sound effects over them in order to reconstruct the complete cues.

Hey all! A bit of exclusive news from our multi-part interview with Robert Meyer Burnett - plans are currently underway for a Blu-Ray release of Star Trek: The Animated Series. Rob also mentioned that he had a "crazy idea" for the release that, if he could pull it off, would be very interesting.

Also - Rob gave his verdict on the Remastered Star Trek: The Original Series Blu-Ray release.

I admit I am surprised that The Animated Series is even a candidate for blu-ray release, but nevertheless it looks like the entire Star Trek saga is now bound for the format.

I wonder how they plan to do it, maybe rectify a few shots?

As for the 'crazy idea', i unashamedly mention Secret of Vulcan Fury once more, it would possibly be a great addition. Also, could they do something with 25th Anniversary/Judgement Rites? They'd be great to draw people in!

I would assume they corrected his skin color to blue. Due to the director's colorblindness, he was originally rendered with gray skin. (A tie-in novel in which he appeared a few years ago explained this by saying he was half-Aenar.)

I would assume they corrected his skin color to blue. Due to the director's colorblindness, he was originally rendered with gray skin. (A tie-in novel in which he appeared a few years ago explained this by saying he was half-Aenar.)

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The LaserDisc edition had him caucasian colored, giving me the impression that he was half-human, like Spock. The DVD had him grey colored. Also, take note that the black collar isn't on the DVD editon.

Given the lack of detail in animation, I didn't think that this was something that could benefit from a Blu-ray release. But if they clean up anything that needs to be cleaned up, I can see that as a benefit.

It would be wonderful if they redid all the episodes with modern animation and they could even maybe lengthen the episodes using the voices taken from the cancelled video game Vulcan's fury.

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I'm kinda "meh" on the new animation thing that everybody seems to want, but I would love to see a new episode done in the original style. If there's enough audio from that game, that would be a fun idea indeed.

I don't get the idea of wanting to see it redone in a different animation style. That's like saying you want to see the Mona Lisa redone as a sculpture, or hear a Metallica song redone for a string quartet -- or see TOS redone with found footage-style shakycam. The transposition to another medium might be an interesting exercise, but one would hardly be a replacement for the other. It's not like upgrading software or buying a more sophisticated vacuum cleaner or something. They're different styles of art and they're equally valid.

I'm not sure that parameter fits what Mr. Burnett actually said, which was, "There are plans afoot to bring The Animated Series to Blu-ray, and I have an idea that would be crazy to pull off, but if we could it would be really interesting." So it sounds like he's not very confident that his idea would be doable at all. Beyond that, well, the article says he's responsible for the special features on the Blu-Ray sets, so it's reasonable to think he's talking about an idea for the special features rather than some kind of alteration of TAS itself. As for what that could be, there's no further information on which to base a conjecture.